Ninja and Pirate: Volume 1 On Sale Now!

The King Is Back

I have always been a fan of giant monster movies. That’s why I was giddy as a pale, tubby schoolgirl when Pacific Rim came out. I am stoked for this movie and have been ever since it was announced.

You know, one of my fondest childhood memories came from 1998, when Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla hit theaters. I was so excited about it. They didn’t reveal Big G’s face for any of the promotional material. It had such an air of mystery to it and it looked so real and intense I knew I just had to see it. I don’t know if my dad likes giant monster movies too, I think he did as a kid, but he took me to see it. Just him and me. We went to see it at this shoddy little theater on his Air Force Base. I remember the room was sparsely packed, maybe thirty or forty people in there and we were all waiting to see that son of a gun hit the big screen.

We waited. Then we waited some more. We saw a white screen. (Godzilla in Antarctica), then there was a blue screen for a while, like when you are waiting for a VHS to start playing. I think we called that Godzilla in the Pacific. So, Mr. Del Toro I will be contacting you about some copyright issues our lawyers need to see to. After about 12 minutes of blue screen the lights dimmed and the cheers went up because we were about 20 minutes past the time for the film to start. It got dark and we stared at the black screen (Godzilla Can’t Find the Light Switch). Then we stared some more. Then the lights came up. (Antarctica’s Revenge) Then they dimmed again (Godzilla At Night: Who Put This Coffee Table Here? Seriously, I Just Stubbed My Toe On It. I Think It’s Broken.) After about 30 minutes the movie jumped in to Ferris Bueller talking about worms and not noticing as he walks into a giant footprint. Things went downhill from there.

There’s a part of the movie where Zilla gets taken down by two F-14s because Emmerich can’t sleep at night if ‘Murica doesn’t blow up 700 metric tons of whatever is closest by sundown. When the F-14’s hit the screen split in two. The top half of the projection was on the bottom and the bottom half was on the top making for a hilarious scene where Bueller is talking remorsefully to a colossal pair of nostrils while his legs danced impishly through the air over his head like some kind of modern-day Peter Pan shadow that couldn’t be bothered to make the whole trip. The rest of the movie kept this slapstick tone, such as when Jean Reno enters a phone booth and delivers the moral of the story to a completely uninterested trenchcoat tail.

When my dad and I walked out to talk to somebody about the projection problems we saw the reason, two pimply faced greasy teenagers that were supposed to be working the booth spending their necessary and apparently finite energy for the work day over a game of Tekken. Needless to say we didn’t go back there, but I had a blast that day. My dad and I were making fun of the movie with all the problems we encountered and I still joke with him about it to this day. I think that may have led to my infatuation with Mystery Science Theater 3000. It was a good time. The movie was the awful story of a mutated French Iguana trying, and succeeding, to outact Ferris Bueller, the Professional, and Moe from the Simpsons. But the experience was one I’ll never forget.

But seriously if this new Godzilla is as bad as the 98’ travesty I will straight up murder somebody. I can write that on the Internet, right? That won’t come back on me negatively?